This overview of Apache® Governance describes how the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) is governed. This focuses both on the familiar Apache Way
that Apache project communities use, as well as the important
behind-the-scenes governance of the non-profit corporation itself.

As a Delaware, US-based membership corporation and an IRS registered 501(c)(3) non-profit,
the Apache Software Foundation is
governed by a set of corporate bylaws like many other companies. The Membership
elects a Board of Directors which sets corporate policy and appoints officers; various
officers set and execute corporate policy; and the Board appoints various Project Management
Committees (PMCs) which run our many Apache software projects.

While many people are familiar with the consensus-based, community driven
governance known as The Apache Way that is used by Apache projects, readers
perhaps may not be as familiar with how the ASF as a corporation works behind the scenes.

能让你湿到不行的小说Behind the scenes of the many successful Apache projects, the ASF is run and
managed like any other corporations. While the ethos of The Apache Way
- merit, consensus, community, charity - is reflected within our corporate
governance activities, the details of how the corporation legally works are
somewhat different than how our projects work.

The Board sets corporate policy, appoints officers, forms PMCs, and
delegates policy or corporate execution areas to those officers, and delgates
responsibility for managing their own projects to PMCs.
Read about the Board of Directors.

PMCs vote on new committers and PMC members for their project, and set per-project policies
as well as formally voting on software product releases. Read about PMCs.
PMCs report quarterly directly to the board, not to the President.

The board elects a Chairman (a director) and appoints a usual slate of
executive officers. Officer positions are all unpaid volunteers, and serve at
the direction of the board in their specific areas of responsibility.
We always have a complete list of officers published. Officers are
responsible both for managing the Foundations affairs in their specific areas,
as well as reporting monthly status reports back to the board.

能让你湿到不行的小说Executive officers include the normal slate of officers, including a President,
Executive Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Assistant Secretary and
Treasurer.

The board has appointed several officers for corporate-wide
functions能让你湿到不行的小说 - this includes Vice Presidents to oversee Brand Management,
Conference Planning, Fundraising, Legal Affairs, Marketing and Publicity,
Travel Assistance, and W3C Relations, among others. The board delegates the
authority to set and execute corporate policy within the officer's specific
area of responsibility.

The board has also appointed a VP of Infrastructure, who is responsible for the
day-to-day running of our Infrastructure team and the hardware that keeps
Apache running. Since our infrastructure (websites, mailing lists, source code
control, wikis, etc.) is a shared resource for all projects at the ASF, it is
managed centrally.

能让你湿到不行的小说Most of these corporate-wide officers report directly to the President on a
monthly basis. This separates the strategic oversight the board provides at
a high level from the day-to-day operations that the President and these
officers handle for the ASF and on behalf of various Apache projects.

Board Committees

The board has two Board or Executive Committees, which operate with
the authority of the board within their scope. Currently this includes
the Legal Affairs committee and the Security Team. Board committees
report out monthly to the board.

Officers or President's Committees

The President and some officers have created President's committees to
assist with the policy or operations work of individual officers. Officers
appoint other volunteers to help with their scoped work, in areas like
Brand Management, Fundraising, and Travel Assistance. The responsible
officers provide a report for the whole committee to the President monthly.

Within the ASF, the board delegates the technical direction of all projects
to each PMC. PMCs are expected to follow corporate policies in terms of
licensing, branding, infrastructure and so on, and are expected to manage
their projects independently using The Apache Way. PMCs are tasked with all
other aspects of project management, especially technical direction.

PMCs work to produce software for the public good by voting on releases
of their project's software products. Read about PMCs.

Committers

Committers are members of project development community who have been granted
write access to an Apache
project. Each project's PMC invites people who have shown merit
within their project to become committers. Committers must sign a brief
Individual Contributor
License Agreement (ICLA), which clearly defines the terms under which
intellectual property has been contributed to the ASF. This allows our
projects to ensure that the products they publish can safely be released
under the Apache License.

Committers are elected separately for every project; merit within one project
is not necessarily transferable to other projects. Committers also have access
to a one Foundation-wide committer repository, where a few extra services and
tools useful for doing Apache project work are available. Committers may also
list themselves in our worldwide listing of committers
, as well as within our Community Development mentoring program.

能让你湿到不行的小说As a community-based organization, there many other groups of individuals and
organizations that provide valuable work and services for the ASF and Apache
projects, but are not directly part of our corporate governance.

Contractors / Paid Staff

能让你湿到不行的小说The ASF pays both for a number of services, and for several contractors to
continue to keep core infrastructure running. Normally we rely on volunteers for
all of our work - both at the technical and project levels, and at the
organizational and board levels. However maintaining a reliable and secure
infrastructure to keep all of our services running requires paid staff.

Currently, the ASF contracts or employs several full-time sysadmins to maintain our wide
variety of services and machines; these expenses along with hardware and bandwidth
costs make up the largest part of our annual corporate budget. We also contract for
marketing and publicity services.

Note that the ASF does not pay for software development on any Apache projects;
we rely on volunteers for all of our project coding work. The ASF focuses on providing
the technical, legal, and community infrastructure for like-minded communities;
we trust that healthy project communities will build their own software products.

Contributors

Contributors are individuals who contribute patches - source code, documentation,
help on mailing lists - to Apache projects. All Apache projects greatly
appreciate the thousands of volunteers who have contributed work back to our
projects.

能让你湿到不行的小说Contributors do not have a specific governance role - however healthy projects
are always on the lookout for productive and helpful contributors, so they
can consider nominating new committers.

Users

Users use our software, and often ask for help about our software. Many helpful
users are non-technical, but still spend the time to submit bug reports and
answer questions on our project's mailing lists.

Sponsors

Many organizations and a few individuals have signed up as Sponsors of Apache,
and have pledged annual donations to the ASF. The ASF is greatly appreciative
of both the financial and other support that our many Sponsors provide, which
ensures we have the infrastructure and other services needed to ensure our
200+ Apache projects can succeed.

To ensure project and corporate independence, Sponsors are not part of
corporate governance at the ASF. Becoming a Sponsor does not give your
organization or employees any specific merit within the ASF or our projects,
although Sponsors are always recognized by the ASF on our Thanks page.

Vendors

The ASF contracts with a number of vendors to provide specific services,
like accounting, non-profit tax filing, legal counsel, hosting or
bandwidth services, and the like. Vendors are not otherwise part of our
governance structures. Vendor relationships are managed by a volunteer
officer wherever possible.